Tetris Shower

By Jamie Thingelstad,
May 3, 2009.
319 words, about 1 minute read.

A couple of months ago we decided to re-tile our downstairs bathroom shower. After 20 years the house had settled enough that there were notable cracks that we didn’t feel we could just caulk over. We pondered what to do with the tiling and considered a number of designs. Our friend that was helping Tammy with the design did a Tetris® concept and I loved it right away!

Making the pattern was both harder and easier than you would think. It was critical to me that the tile pattern be correct. I wanted all the game tiles in their normal, whole, shape. This meant that no line in the pattern could be completed, since it would be removed in the game. Making sure the tiles were logically correct was causing some challenges until I just decided to play several games of Quinn, a tetromino game for the Mac, and capture a number of boards. After I adjusted my head to playing Tetris specifically to not complete rows we got a few screenshots and put them together.

The completed bathroom tiles are logically correct. If you look closely you can see that there are empty tiles in all the rows. The top rows are all empty since the game is in progress, and there is a single tile in the process of falling.

The tiling was done by Terry Owens of Como Lake Carpentry, who also did our new garage shelves and a bunch of other projects for us. He’s awesome. We really dig the look of it, and it’s fun to have a colorful tile pattern that appears fairly random but is really a game.